Collective decision making has a long tradition in legislative processes through the concept of a consultation. For example, a lawmaker may invite a selected group of stakeholders to provide feedback on a draft of a new proposal, such as, a legislative document structured into sections and paragraphs to integrate hitherto unknown aspects and to gain consent for the proposal. The same principle applies to construction plans, where components refer to different modules or aspects of the project. While the collection of feedback from stakeholders is often mandatory in these two fields, policy and strategy papers, organizational designs and product/service descriptions lend to this natural decomposition structure, too. Therefore, consultations with members of an organization and user communities are an attractive means to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational change and new product development processes, especially as today the internet has dramatically lowered the transaction costs for both the proponent and the evaluators when compared to traditional media.
However, the ease at which feedback can be gathered via electronic means comes at the price of making the process of selecting those proposals for component changes that actually increase overall agreement by the community complex and error-prone due to the sheer number of possibly conflicting change proposals. The invention therefore provides an automatic method that helps the proponent to select those changes that have the greatest potential to increase consent to the concept by relevant evaluators.